I think one day I may get this phrase tattooed on my face so I can digest its meaning daily. Curious, It makes me think of a word I don’t often get the same kind of warm fuzzies when I think of: Surrender.
I think a lot of the depression and anxiety in our culture exists because we are consistently fed the idea that if we have a certain income, certain relationship, and certain status we will be happy.
We are fed the idea that the perfect job, perfect relationship, perfect health and perfect family are all attainable if we just work hard enough to get it. And we bought that lie. So when we’ve finished checking off all the boxes in our must-have list and we’re sitting in a bathtub feeling empty on a Friday night, we wonder why we still aren’t happy or what else we could possibly be missing.
As many books, movies, and personal experiences that have attested to the opposite of this concept– the ‘happiness is not found in the things you have but the relationships you create,’ concept – and as much as I know that that is far more adaptive stance to have over the American dream concept, I still find myself screaming anytime I have set my ducks in a row and they have all fallen down.
Why?
Because we hate the idea that control is not in our hands. It’s not even about obtaining certain goals or finding answers to existential questions, it’s that we set out with the idea of how to do/say/complete something, and it did not happen the way we envisioned. We don’t often value predictability, but we do value competition. We don’t often value process and time, but we do value results. Which makes it that much difficult to welcome an experience outside of our initiation.
When a situation comes about that calls our control into question; the death of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, a loss of a job, a loss of any kind really – We throw our fists in the air and we can’t seem to understand how something like this could happen. After all, we’ve anticipated every obstacle and planned accordingly, we have a storm shelter for every crisis imaginable. Yet within minutes our life is in pieces and everything we thought we knew is called into question.
Someone like me in this scenario constantly ruminates “Why..? How come? What if I had done this..? I should have said this.. If we had only tried this.. I wish that we could’ve tried this..” Over and over, until I feel crazy knowing I have all the answers but no opportunity where the corresponding questions are being asked.
By opening our empty hands and spinning in our own questions, it’s not answers that we are seeking. It’s meaning. We want to know why we had to go through such a loss, we want to at least know what purpose it serves. We wonder if the justification of why we had to endure something was worth the pain we went through. If we can make meaning of our loss, we believe it can shed redemption on our pain. The only thing worse than pain, is unwarranted pain.
In the most inner most part of our souls I think we are aware that what we do and what we accomplish has/should have no reflection on our innate worth or adequacy yet we still often operate in a meritocracy where we are trying so hard to prove ourselves or show ourselves justified.
We measure ourselves, we compare ourselves to others, and we have a unique ranking and hierarchy system that only makes sense to us. This is again a reason we ask “Why me?” “What did I do wrong?” “How could this happen?” in our moments of loss. These questions come about because we rely more on a fluid measurement and system of our own perceived justification than we rely on gratitude, grace and acceptance.
I think underneath all this, a lot of us believe we are exceptions or we’re mostly good people that don’t deserve pain and suffering. It makes us question when we do suffer and shed contempt when those who we deem should suffer, do. We reduce life to a series of checks and balances where we only suffer when we’ve merited misery, and we only succeed if we’ve been virtuous enough to earn it.
If we continue to experience loss or pain, we may even expect to receive it in the future, or find identity in self-effacing, self-deprecating thoughts. We may idealize others and assume they are so much better than us and as a result others never experience the kind of adversity we have.
This whole mindset needs to shift, because the initial idea that we are in control of our destinies based on a meritocracy system is a complete distortion. Life in it’s richness contains both joy and pain, suffering and happiness, gain and loss. We are not an exception and certainly not culpable if we experience more or less of one than the other, because it was never based on our orchestration.
These dynamics are inevitable byproducts of living in a free world. When we surrender to them, we are consequently liberated, and freer to receive love knowing we are not victims held in tandem to our actions.
When we initiate a mindset of gratitude where we take time to behold and recognize how fortunate we are to be included into this existence, we accept both joy and sorrow as equally inevitable, and I would argue as equally essential.
Richard Rohr was the one who said “Love is saying Yes to what is.” It doesn’t make suffering or pain any less easier to undergo through this lens, but it does make suffering more acceptable because we see that it is inevitable and paramount to our understanding of what it means to be human– not a cruel form of punishment.